Peter Gabriel — Sledgehammer

"Sledgehammer" is a song by rock musician Peter Gabriel. It was released as the lead single from his fifth studio album, So. It reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States on July 26, 1986; #1 in Canada on July 21, 1986, where it spent four weeks; and #4 on the UK Singles Chart, thanks in part to its music video. It was his biggest hit in North America and ties with "Games Without Frontiers" as his biggest hit in the United Kingdom.

The song's music video won a record nine MTV Video Music Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards and Best British Video at the 1987 Brit Awards. The song also saw Gabriel nominated for three Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. In a 2005 poll conducted by Channel 4 the music video was ranked second on their list of the 100 Greatest Pop Videos.

The "Sledgehammer" video was commissioned by Tessa Watts at Virgin Records, directed by Stephen R. Johnson and produced by Adam Whittaker. Aardman Animations and the Brothers Quay provided claymation, pixilation, and stop motion animation that gave life to images in the song. Many of these techniques had been employed in earlier music videos, such as Talking Heads's 1985 hit "Road to Nowhere", also directed by Johnson. The style was later used in the video for "Big Time", another single from So.

Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while filming the video one frame at a time. "It took a lot of hard work," Gabriel recalled. "I was thinking at the time, 'If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them.'" Two dead, headless, featherless chickens were animated using stop-motion and shown dancing along to the synthesised shakuhachi solo. This section was animated by Nick Park, of Aardman Animations, who was refining his work in plasticine animation at the time. The video ended with a large group of extras jerkily rotating around Gabriel, among them his daughters Anna-Marie and Melanie, the animators themselves and director Stephen Johnson's girlfriend. Also included were six women who posed as the back-up singers of the song.

"Sledgehammer" won nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987, the most awards a single video has won. It ranked at #4 on MTV's 100 Greatest Music Videos Ever Made (1999). "Sledgehammer" has also been declared MTV's #1 animated video of all time. The video was voted #7 on TMF's Ultimate 50 Videos You Must See, which first aired June 24, 2006. It ranked at #2 on VH1's "Top 20 Videos of the '80s" and #1 on "Amazing Moment in Music" on the Australian TV show 20 to 1 in 2007. It won Best British Video at the 1987 Brit Awards and was nominated for the Best Music Video category for the first annual Soul Train Music Awards in that same year.

The music video was remastered into 4K resolution, and was released in 2018 through Apple Music.

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